The Bermuda Blob: Teddy Tucker's Carcass at Mangrove Bay

Teddy Tucker knew the waters around Bermuda better than most. Fisherman, diver, treasure hunter and wreck explorer, he found more than 100 wrecks and the "Tucker Cross" in 1955. He was a founding member of the Bermuda Underwater Exploration Institute, and scientists on the island often worked with him. So when something strange came ashore in 1988, Tucker was the man who went to look.

May 1988, by most accounts. The scientists who later studied it said only "during the summer of 1988." A carcass washed into Mangrove Bay, Somerset, in Sandys Parish at the west end of Bermuda. It measured about 2.50 × 1.25 × 0.30 m. Tucker described it as "2½ to 3 feet thick ... very white and fibrous ... with five 'arms or legs,' rather like a disfigured star." It had no eyes. No mouth. No bone structure.

Tucker looked closer. "It was white, the exterior of it was fibry, almost like wet wool. It was very dense, and inside of it was white all the way through and had cells almost like a honeycomb but not regular."

He photographed it. He took small pieces of tissue and fixed them in formalin. The popular press gave it a name immediately. The Bermuda Blob. His photograph later appeared in Richard Ellis's Monsters of the Sea in 1994.

The shape rang a bell. Fishermen compared it with the St. Augustine Monster, the carcass that came ashore in Florida in 1896. Scientists noted that, apart from its much smaller mass, the Bermuda specimen was remarkably similar. The old hope stirred again. Perhaps a giant octopus, Octopus giganteus, was real.

Sidney K. "Skip" Pierce took up the samples with colleagues including Eugenie Clark. In 1995 they published their results in the Biological Bulletin. Electron microscopy and amino acid analysis showed almost pure collagen from vertebrate skin. The Bermuda tissue pointed to a cold-blooded vertebrate, a large bony fish or a shark or ray. "I wanted it to come out to be an octopus," Pierce told reporter Rick Weiss. "Everybody likes a giant octopus story. I'm sorry to say it did not come out that way." Clyde Roper of the Smithsonian put it plainly. "This settles the question of the great Florida sea monster and the Bermuda Blob."

It did not quite settle it. In 2004 Pierce's team compared the Bermuda tissue with carcasses from St. Augustine, Tasmania, Nantucket and Chile. This time all of them were grouped as the collagen network of whale blubber. Only the Nantucket Blob yielded usable DNA, so the Bermuda verdict rests on microscopes and chemistry, not genetics. "Once again, to our disappointment, we have not found any evidence that any of the blobs are the remains of unknown sea monsters," Pierce said.

Tucker was never fully convinced. "It was not be a part of any fish or shark, I'm familiar with all of that, I don't know what it was. Nobody gave me a real definite answer." He died on 9 June 2014, aged 89.

A second Bermuda Blob came ashore in January 1997. Its samples came from Wolfgang Sterrer of the Bermuda Biological Station, and it too proved to be whale fatty tissue. Together they joined the long roll of globsters, beside the Nantucket Blob and the Chilean Blob. Shapeless, pale and silent, each one a monster until the microscope had its say.